Passing Time

I'm not going to lie, July was tough. Not strenuous tough, but mentally challenging as we have achieved a rut where most days are pretty much the same. What day of quarantine are we on now...? 140 days!! Lately, it's been either too hot and humid or too rainy to offer much of a change of scenery outdoors. On some days, a small group of moms walk and kids bike 3 miles in the nearby park, but we're home before 10am and drenched with sweat. However, it's worth it to be active and to have people to discuss the crazy school options we're faced with for this fall. On one particular day, Owen was desperate to get out of the house, so I took him out for some 1-on-1 time. His choice: Donuts! His pick: a coconut cream-filled donut as big as his hand.

We have tried a few more online classes for fun to break up the monotony, but they can be a little lackluster, especially if the kids aren't super interested (RIP, Mandarin and Anatomy). It's also glitchy to watch videos over Zoom (So long, Harry Potter movie club and Brain Games). One that we made them watch was chess. They love it, can't you tell? Ha ha! Maybe some day they'll appreciate having some chess knowledge...

We did make it back to Surfside for another beach day. It makes for a long, sticky, dirty day, but it's great for a change of scenery. We learned our lesson from the last visit and reapplied sunscreen a few times, which made the following days much more enjoyable. They were having a lot of seaweed wash up on the beach that day, but the kids didn't care about it at all. Personally, I did not like the feeling of seaweed clusters brushing up on me in the water, but it was slightly better than the partial breeze that was covering everything in sand under our umbrella.

It could be worse, right? At least we are stuck with people that we like most of the time.

All of this time together has really shone a light on personality quirks. For example, Hadley declared at lunch that she was "eating Ruffles, not potato chips." We told her that Ruffles were, in fact, potato chips, but she claimed we were wrong. I found the bag, showed her where it says "potato chips", and asked her how she explained that. She nonchalantly, without skipping a beat, says, "that's just a typo." This is my life! So many questions... how does she know the word typo? how is she so brazen and flippant already at age 8? what does this mean for future arguments? Stay tuned! (I will also have it noted that she was excited to turn 8 "because that's almost 10, which is closer to being a teenager." And she is saving her birthday money for her first apartment. What? I don't even think I had birthday money at her age, but if I did, I was probably saving up for a Barbie or something... Sheesh.)